頑張れ！
(I just chucked down some of @MegaZeroX 's cider to aid your quest. He/she has been hiding it but I found the stash… don’t tell on me)
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Level 38 get!
New week - new level - new breakthrough! This time I had to brace myself and show some courage to take my very first 2 lessons on iTalki! Not like anxiety and communication fear being anything new to me, still every time I fight my own brain like it’s first time.
Guess, here I should thank @truandissimo and @RoseMuncher for encouraging me to start using it in their posts above! That was a great help to kickstart, and now after just 2 lessons I feel myself quite confident and have pretty clear view of what to do next.
Surprisingly, I feel quite easy to express myself in Japanese. First lesson was quite stressful (like it should!), but second one was much more relaxed. Maybe I’ll get rollback soon though, but I’m still quite happy about my start.
Still, there is one issue keep bothering me: neither of teachers didn’t correct me enough. With all their praise regarding my skills, I totally feel myself turbo-clumsy with making own sentences. So here comes the request! >>>>> vvvvvv
2 questions for those who are using italki for a while:
- Do your teachers correct you when you’re speaking? If yes, how does it happen usually? I mean, I’ve asked mines directly to do so, but that didn’t help. Second time I was trying to put more spaces in my speech, so she could stick into - no use either.
- Did you give a try to a community feature to write some essays and then community give you an edits? Does it work for you? From a brief survey I done just now, Japanese users there are quite active and responsive. Still would appreciate any experience fellow Skytree climbers had.
Maybe I should make separate thread about it, but once I’m blogging here my progress anyways, guess it won’t hurt.
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I feel ashamed as kimetsu no yaiba fan that i keep failing 飾る to decorate かざる
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there is such a thing as speed climbing 
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14 kanji away from level 8! I’m glad, I feel like I’ve been on 7 for forever now…
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Finally got to my first burns. Guess it’s time to see how busy it will be with all srs stages active.
I also disabled my radicals first reordering so that I can get ahead of the vocab a bit. It might make this level a couple days longer but hopefully I won’t get slammed by about 80 “new” vocab from the last level right as I level up.
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やった Leveled up to 38!
Barely survived. A bit late to level up due to very very very busy week at work. 5/5 working days full with deadlines and meeting. 
2 days with overtime until past midnight to catch deadline.
3 days with 会議地獄 (meeting hell), one of it with 9hrs meeting! This one is due to a lot of tickets need to be discussed and our team have very complicated services.
Beside, it’s my big happiness that last week I finished my web page for projecting level up time until 
(Link) . Especially getting positive feedbacks and bug reporting & fixing. Thinking of projection, next month will be my first fast level 
I felt between excited and worried. I guess if it’s meeting hell week I should bailed out.
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I’ve had to hunt for tutors who do actual corrections. Japanese people are usually way too “polite” to correct you in the moment, which is just so annoying when you really want corrections to improve. A couple of my tutors do real-time corrections throughout the whole session, but I’m sure they’re not doing it for every sentence that comes out of my mouth. But a few of my regular tutors (who have become regulars in my book for this very reason) will either put corrections or useful new vocab in the lesson “review” box after I submit the payment for the lesson, OR will send me corrections directly via SKYPE after the class. That is SUPER helpful for studying later and since they’re much faster at typing in Japanese than I am, saves me so much time compared to taking tons of notes on my mistakes during class. Other than these tutors, when I’m just looking for a cheap class or a different person to talk to, I make it a set “time” to correct me. Like, I just have a regular conversation with no corrections (which is helpful in many ways, too, for fluency and speed and feeling self-efficacy in the language) for the majority of the class and then I’ll say, “I’m going to set a timer for 5 minutes and I’m going to talk at you and I want you to correct anything that sounds weird or off during this time and tell me how to say it better.” That usually gets even the reluctant correcters to actually correct.
I have used the community feature to write essays or journal entries in the past but I haven’t kept up with it. If writing is a major goal for you, go for it! I’ve found the feedback very helpful and think it would definitely help improve my writing, but I just haven’t spent my time that way in a long time.
Also, yes, @RoseMuncher you are taking up a disproportionate amount of my time this week. Thank you for acknowledging. BUT, I give it willingly. I’m planning on including a breakdown of my JLPT study plans in my study log post this week with level up (should be tomorrow) and I’ll pop back in here and share a link to that post when I do.
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Welcome to the Journey.
Welcome to the thread mpinder san 
Congrats AI 
From Mimikazari 
That is one of my favorite scenes 
Way to go!!
Congrats on that major milestone
!
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助言、ください！
I took a 6 month break from WK. My review pile started at 580 and I’ve been chipping away- unfortunately I forgot everything from the last few lessons so I always get those reviews wrong the first time I see them. My goal was to get my reviews to 0 before starting the next lesson but they just seem never ending. Now that I’m on reviews from my recent levels it takes about an hour to get through 80 reviews.
Should I go ahead and start on the lessons? Get my reviews to 0 first? Take a few hours to read through the terms and do the reviews later?
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I finally leveled up to 26! This was my longest level yet at 11 days, 3 hours. I kept failing kanji at critical times. It did give me more time to catch up on vocabulary though. Hopefully I can resume a slightly faster pace going forward though.
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Nope. Please take the reviews to Zero. Repeat that for 4 days before you start any lessons. If you start lessons, it will be harder for you. A little patience now will go a long way in the future. Remember these reviews will come back soon. If you add those lesson reviews too, you are going to have a giant pile of reviews coming at you in batches again. Taking it slow and adding some buffer time here will alleviate a lot of pressure on you in the future. Future Mikki will thank Present Mikki
Congrats Mefire san
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mmmm i think thats the advice i needed to hear i just didnt want to hear it haha. alright one more week of reviews, here i come thank you @KyokaJiro 
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Yeah, definitely clear those out, starting lessons now will only make that pile much worse.
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Yasss 見たい
As soon as this came up in my lessons I went to the page for it in the KKLC because I knew it would be a problem.
Just spending a bit of time with it worked wonders but tbh the KKLC didn’t have any great advice either.
You are the best!
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I know you already got the ‘reviews first!! always reviews!!’ advice, which I definitely echo.
I’d also add that for after the reviews, if you have any vocab knocking around in those lessons from your previous level that unlocked as you levelled up, you might want to try and get those cleared through Apprentice into Guru before you start the Level 13 content by using the reorder script to clear any Level 13 items from your lessons initially. Whenever I take a break from lessons for a month or so, that really helps me hit the ground running when I come back because it’s essentially giving you a clean slate with no previous level content snapping at your heels. I like to do 15 or so lessons a day (5 kanji, 10 vocab usually) so it’s useful to not have mountains of vocab weighing me down and upsetting the balance before I even begin a level.
Disclaimer: Doesn’t work for everyone, but worth a try! 
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Thank you for your reply! I see, so at least, I’m not alone with this issue. So far guess I have not much to do but to keep trying different tutors to find ones who do this job properly. Will try to stick to “correction time” advice too!
Can you put a bit more details regarding why you not sticking to it? No offence, I just trying to figure out possible cons. Writing is not my major goal, but now I’m struggling mostly with using proper grammar and make proper sentence structure, using proper particles, etc. Mostly I’d like to improve my talking and 1-on-1 conversation skills, but alas it’s happened to be difficult to get proper feedback. So with this essay correction feature, I feel I could improve my grammar using a bit, which consequently would reflect in speaking as well. What do you think about it?
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The other day I reached level 31! Yay!
Now that I officially cleared the halfwaypoint, I feel like the next 10 levels will still be a challenge, but once I reach that 2/3 mark, motivational speaking there won’t be much left to stop me. In my mind, WK is just like a mountain that you have to climb until lv 30 and after that the descend begins. But for the descend you only need the first ten levels to build up momentum and after things are basically turning on their own.
Now remind you, I haven’t reached 60 yet, so this is just my peronal feeling, maybe Paradise and Reality are really as terrible as everyone makes them out to be. Guess there’s just one way to find out Yay, corny
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レベル１１。よかった！
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To be honest, these last 20 levels feels to me steeper than ever.
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